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Jamie’s dream was to hit the big time at a New York tech start-up. Jamie’s …
excellent summer fun
The author says, basically, the world was too harsh in 2020 and 2021 for him to write a serious novel. So he wrote this instead, for which I'm grateful. It's not deep, it's not artful, it's just good plain fun. Highly recommended as a summer vacation read.
The first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven …
Fascinating, both in the “this is how science evolves” detective + social story aspect (scientist sees puzzle, solves it, receives scorn from the establishment) and in trying to wrap your head around the geology of it (10x the Amazon! For days!)
Could be better written; most people probably better off just reading the Wikipedia article :)
Sort of scattered but very interesting book on how (among other things) British rule of Ireland and America differed in the late 1700s, how the colonists used the British system of law against Britain, and why that didn’t work for Ireland.
This is a sublimely weird book, less “plot” and more “stream of consciousness”. That may scratch your itch; it sometimes did for me but other times I wished it would get on with it. Definitely only recommended for those into extreme atmospherics (pun not intended…)
Worth noting that the cover (at least of my copy) speaks of the “early 20th century” so I went in expecting steampunk; it’s actually 21st century, ie present day-ish.
Dated; the vision of an early 2000s world mostly powered by nuclear instead of coal and gas never came to pass, rendering many of the complex concerns mooted in the book less threatening.
Still an interesting (and as ever with McPhee, well-written) picture of a lesser-known human grappling with first The Bomb and later many possible bombs.
A meandering book, as befits its subject.
On the remote planet Solaria the first murder for two hundred years has been committed. …
The detective story ages pretty well, but basically nothing else here does.
The core detective story here holds up fairly well, and some of the basics of human-robot fears (primarily unemployment) hold up pretty well too.
But boy… so much else does not. There’s both the trivial (our hero is really concerned about tobacco rations for his pipe… to smoke during meetings!) but also much deeper cringe—the treatment of the only woman in the story is deeply misogynistic, and to put the robots in their place characters call them “boy”. In that sense, it’s a good reminder that our modern science fiction is made much more interesting by taking seriously the interests of everyone, not just white men, but … hard to recommend reading just for that.
Perhaps the one thing that’s actually interesting as a time capsule is that the book’s plot is driven in large part by scarcity, in a way we don’t tend to think much about (or …
The core detective story here holds up fairly well, and some of the basics of human-robot fears (primarily unemployment) hold up pretty well too.
But boy… so much else does not. There’s both the trivial (our hero is really concerned about tobacco rations for his pipe… to smoke during meetings!) but also much deeper cringe—the treatment of the only woman in the story is deeply misogynistic, and to put the robots in their place characters call them “boy”. In that sense, it’s a good reminder that our modern science fiction is made much more interesting by taking seriously the interests of everyone, not just white men, but … hard to recommend reading just for that.
Perhaps the one thing that’s actually interesting as a time capsule is that the book’s plot is driven in large part by scarcity, in a way we don’t tend to think much about (or at least very differently). Food is presumed to be a big challenge in the year 5000ish, because the earth’s population is… eight billion! (We’re at 7.9B right now, and food insecurity, while a very real problem, has never been lower globally.) Phone calls are rationed! And there’s the potential for running out of energy because we’re… using all the uranium! (It does, at one point, nod towards disposal of radioactive waste as a problem, which does remain real, but in a very different way than Asimov predicted.) This probably particularly jumped out at me because I just finished reading Charles Mann’s Wizard and the Prophet, which talks a lot about the intellectual debates in the late 1940s-early 1950s that both led to much of modern environmentalism and almost certainly informed Asimov’s writing in the late 1950s.
Bottom line: this isn’t bad but it got so much wrong, is deeply problematic, and is a good reminder that the true Golden Age of scifi right now, not 65 years ago.
Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel …
Gladstone is a careful observer of people and places, and that shows here. His vision of millenials frustrated by the world they're born into feels nuanced and sensitive; angry, sad, and above all empathetic–without beating the reader over the head with it. Many writers are grappling with the current moment, and Gladstone does vastly better than most at writing something that captures the moment without caricaturing it.
But the ending just didn't work for me, at all. So hard for me to give it the love I might otherwise have had 3/4 of the way through.
Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of …
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence …
I am wrecked
I am hit by this like a wrecking ball. I am struggling to breathe, much less write. So I guess go read it?
